Building on positive moments

VIDEO INTERACTION GUIDANCE (VIG)

Video Interactive Guidance (VIG) is a strengths-based therapeutic intervention: highlighting and building on positive moments to enhance communications within relationships.

Our practitioners use video clips of your relationship interactions to enhance and attune the communication.

VIG intervention is a process of active engagement in change.

What is Active Engagement?

Participants are supported by a VIG Guider to view and build on ‘Best Moments’ in their interaction with others. Whilst reviewing the clip, clients will explore the actions that are making a difference. The client can expect to be asked to negotiate their own goals. Though this process of active engagement and reflection there client’s skills are increased to attune to the other person, thereby realising their own hopes for a more positive relationship with those who are important to them.

Attunement

VIG helps the process of ‘attunement’.

Many clients experience a ‘light bulb’ moments of increased attunement when viewing themselves with others who are important to them in a supportive setting.

Evidence for the effectiveness of VIG lies in the client’s increasing capacity to take in something positive and use it for themselves. For example, a recognition that listening and responding positively helps the other person to be calmer, and builds on the attachment relationship.

The VIG intervention can be highly effective in initiating change in relationships which can feel very ‘stuck’. VIG can be the beginning of a ‘benign cycle’ of interaction, moving away from the ‘negative cycle’ that they may have been stuck with for years.

Neuroscience shows us, these kinds of changes set in motion changes in the structure of the brain (of the developing child and the parent), so that new brain pathways are formed which reinforce the positive interactions.

What You can expect from your VIG Guider

The skill and sensitivity of the VIG Guider facilitates the client in their own thinking about both their strengths and challenges.

Our VIG Guiders are themselves guided by the values and beliefs around respect and empowerment for the clients. These include a belief that people in troubled situations do want to change, a respect for what participants are managing to achieve in their current difficulties, and a conviction that the power and responsibility for change resides within the participant and their situations.

VIG is commonly used for interactions between children of any age and adults, either parents or professionals, although it can also be used within pairs (or even groups) of adults.

Our Guider’s attunement to our clients is a truly reflexive process.

Our client’s interactions are filmed and edited to produce a short film that focuses on the positives. In the following sessions, the client and our VIG Guider reviews the micro-analysis of successful moments and together reflect on verbal or non-verbal moments of attunement. Our clients reflect collaboratively on what they are doing that is contributing towards the achievement of their goals, celebrating success and make further goals. These reflections move very quickly from analysis of the behaviour to the exploration of feelings, thoughts, wishes and intentions.

Our approach is based on the research that change can be achieved more effectively in the context of a ‘coaching’ relationship which is collaborative rather than prescriptive, empowering rather than de-skilling. It conveys respect for each participants strengths and potential.

Background on VIG

VIG is used in more than 15 countries across the world and by at least 4000 practitioners in helping professions (e.g. social work, education and health) and in business.

When it is used by professionals to reflect on their own communication with service users it is usually referred to as Video Enhanced Reflective Practice (VERP). In both versions, its aim is to give individuals a chance to reflect on their interactions, drawing attention to elements that are successful, and supporting clients to make changes where desired.